Professor Kenneth Pennington Attends Conference at U. Penn

Catholic University law school Professor Kenneth Pennington was among the presenters on April 7 at “Shaping Legal Cultures from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Institutions, Genres, and Theories in Roman, Jewish, Sassanian, Christian, and Islamic Law,” a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dozens of invited scholars from around the nation explored ways in which regions affected the “packaging” of legal traditions within disparate cultures that flourished in geographic contiguity between the sixth and the twelfth centuries.

Students of late Roman, Sassanian, Byzantine, Jewish, Islamic and Christian canon law discussed how their respective traditions of law were shaped by such extra-legal phenomena as patronage networks, institutions, circumstances of material production, compositional choices, modes of disseminating law and jurisprudential theories.

Pennington, who holds the Kelly-Quinn Chair of Ecclesiastical and Legal History in the Columbus School of Law and The School of Religious Studies, titled his talk “Law Schools and the Making of Law in the lus Commune.”

Conference organizers wrote that “By facilitating awareness of the regionalism of certain formative, extra-­?legal factors, this cross-­?cultural collaboration should stimulate new avenues of historical research.”